Daddy’s Home: Ars reviews Bioshock 2

Bioshock 2 may not have needed to happen, but both the story and action do …

The world of Rapture has a lot in common with Jurassic Park. Both fictional places tried to create a sort of closed paradise, playing with nature to fulfill the needs of their respective creators. Both experiments went horribly wrong, making a point about the will of man. In popular culture, when reach exceeds grasp, people die terrible, action-packed deaths.

Bioshock 2 takes place ten years after the events of the first game. I'll keep this review spoiler-free for both games for those who are still playing through Bioshock due to various Steam sales, but allow me to say that things haven't settled down since we last saw the underwater world of Rapture. Everyone is still breathing, you see lumbering riveters repairing damage to windows and other structures, and the Splicers are still hunting for ADAM and coming into contact with the Little Sisters and their hulking Big Daddy escorts. It's a constant fight for survival, and as the frequent scenes of death prove, most are not successful.

There is something of a power vacuum, however, and a few personalities have risen to try to fill it. Bioshock 2 is the story of a Big Daddy. You might call him the Big Daddy. The game begins with a violent act, and you wake up to a world even more violent now than how it was left at the end of the previous game. You have a single name on your lips: Eleanor.

Daddy's home

As a Big Daddy, you begin with your drill as a weapon, but you'll find some seriously heavily ordnance as time goes on. While you used to be at the top of the food chain in Rapture, times have changed, and now there are the Big Sisters to contend with. Big Sisters are Little Sisters that have grown and created their own suits of armor; they utilize the Plasmids to put a serious dent into your hide. You won't fight them often, and you'll be given a warning before you do, but it's a major conflict every time. Be ready.

You're encased in your suit and can breathe underwater, so being able to see Rapture from the outside looking in adds another subtle level of feeling to the game. In many ways it makes you alien, somehow other. You'll spend some portion of the game outside of the environment, looking at the world through your helmet, watching the bodies float lazily past. It's an eerie, claustrophobic feeling, and many times I felt short of breath myself during these sequences.

Bioshock 2 explores what it means to be a Big Daddy, why the program that gave them life was created, and it fills in many holes of the story of Rapture. You'll learn more about the character of the people who made Rapture what it was and what it has become. Your decisions throughout the game will impact the ending you get, and many of your actions will be given greater meaning as the game moves on.

What you do, and how you treat people—it all matters. The story may not have the immediacy or sense of mystery that gave the first game so much power, but after the credits roll you may find yourself thinking back to what you just experienced for quite a while. This is a story that invites conversation and analysis, and that's refreshing. In one section, you fight through a hellish amusement park where Ryan shares his views on government and personal politics. It's disturbing stuff, with an added level of irony when you get to witness Ryan's own views on seeing himself as an automaton via an audio diary.

In many ways, this is the story of Rapture instead of a story about Rapture—the setting is used to tell a tale about power and parenting and lust and revenge.

But how does it play?

As a sequel, it looks, and plays, very much like the first game. Being a Big Daddy may change your outline when you see your shadow, and when you carry a Little Sister she sits on your shoulder and speaks to you, but outside of the ability to breath and move underwater you still feel very much like a man in a first-person shooter. Your weapons look like they would be too big for a man to carry, but in terms of "feel," much of the sense of weight comes from the sound design and the use of rumble.

We reviewed the game on the Xbox 360, and while we can't wait to play on the PC for the improved graphical clarity, the use of force feedback added a great deal to the feeling of isolation and danger. The thuds, the clangs, and the bass you get from being in the underwater environment of Rapture will be absent for those playing with a mouse and a keyboard, and the experience will be slightly poorer for it.

Hacking has been changed in the second game. You now hack vending machines and turrets and safes by stopping a moving needle in either the green or blue section of a dial. If you miss, you shock yourself and take some damage, and in some cases you sound an alarm, sending flying sentry bots your way. You also have a gun that shoots hacking darts at far away machines so you can hack them remotely. The minigame is quick and requires good reflexes, and it does a good job of keeping you in the game. You'll be able to unlock abilities to help you with hacking and, while hacking is a frequent event throughout the game, due to its brevity it's never annoying. Keep in mind that while you're hacking machines you can still move and you can still attack; it doesn't take you out of the moment at all.